Thursday, February 25, 2010

Last weekend I had decided that I really needed to do a 5K for time. I had last done one over a year ago at CrossFit and had a time of 19:30 or so. It was time to see if I could beat that. I mentioned that a 5K was in the plans to my CrossFit Endurance partner, Julie, earlier in the week. Tonight's row had been making me nervous all week. I was almost dreading the workout... and at the same time I couldn't wait to see if I could beat my previous time. Kind of an odd internal tension between wanting to do it, and not wanting to do it.

The row went much better than I had expected! Other than some breathing issues at around the 2500m mark (I had started thinking about my breathing and as a result started breathing "wrong" - started to get side stitches), I was pretty strong and consistent. I maintained a 1:50 pace for the first 2000m or so but that dropped to a 1:54 by the 4K mark, which I managed to maintain, picking it up slightly in the last 500m. My final time was 18:50.1 Around 40 seconds faster than a year ago!

My next challenge will be the "Brighton Burn" 2k competition this weekend at the University of Rochester. Johan passed along a great link to some recommendations on preparing for a 2k time trial. I'll definitely have to strategize around that. I'm hoping to turn in a sub- 7:00 2K. Hopefully that's within reach. Honestly right now I feel like I could do just about anything... I love it when I get a PR.

2 comments:

Way to nail it Jeff! You're doing more than a 500mtr warmup, right? Just not on the C2. Gutsy starting out the TT at 1:50 pace! (no negative split) I usually try for an fast start, settle into even pace and a mad dash at the end. If I go off the pace that I have in mind, it's hard if not impossible to recover. Love to get a look at your splits for that TT. Hope you get that sub 7 this weekend, we'll be cheering for you.

Thanks Johan! I wasn't looking at my splits when I wrote this last night - just going from memory which apparently was a little fuzzy! :-) Here are my 1000m splits: 1:50.5, 1:53.1, 1:54.5, 1:54.0, 1:52.9. I typically don't do well in endurance-type events if I go out too fast. My goal was to hold 1:50 as long as I could, then I was watching my projected finish to try and keep it under 19:00. Still had a little left in the tank at the last 1000m, so was able to hit that pretty hard. Was getting a little better than 10m per pull so I just started counting down from 100. The last 1000m actually felt pretty good (he says now, 12 hours after the fact... not sure I would have said that right after I finished! LOL!)